In view of the hue and cry being made by the opposition parties on land bill reforms, I feel it is important that BJP should take the fight head on and not depend only on PM Modi ji to reach out to the farmers. Let me explain why I say so.

I think the Indian politics has changed for better and changed forever from the days when government could take it for granted that only time they have to face the people is only after 5 years. Governments of the day are not even getting one full year as its honeymoon period, people are in a hurry to demand the changes (that they waited for 60 years). The modes of communication in the 24×7 TV reporting, social media etc have set the governments on its toes and hence if there is any (real or perceived) disquiet in the country about Government’s decision, it should immediately reach out to the people.

But I think that to reach out to the people only government mechanism is not good enough. Number one, government mechanism is busy implementing policies and it takes time to show results. Number two, government mechanism (bureaucracy ), largely, is not geared up to communicate. And lastly, bureaucracy itself needs to be educated about Government’s message.

In the face of it, the mantle falls on the political arm of the government to communicate and be in touch with the people all the time. There are other benefits of doing this :

What was the biggest strength of BJP when it won 2014 elections? It was the support of aam aadmi, it was the support from BJP’s non traditional vote bank i.e. the rural India, it was the votes of the financially weaker section of the society. Today, opposition along with some media is creating a perception that farmers and aam aadmi is unhappy with the Government. If BJP (not government machinery and ministers only) reaches out to these people and communicate directly, opposition which is sitting only in Delhi would have nothing to talk about.

Secondly, with the last 10 years of corruption and 60 years of Congress party rule, people have become weary of governments in general and they embrace the ‘Andolan’ more readily than the government’s narrative. Though, in case of land reforms bill, opposition has not been able to mobilise any protests, it has been successful in creating a perception that people (aam aadmi / farmers) are not happy with the bill.

Modiji’s ‘Mann Ki Baat’ on 22nd March was an excellent talk and it tried to dispel many myths, it tried to give positive side of the bill and it also communicated government’s resolve and sincerity to work in the interest of farmers. But now, I feel, people would view his talk more as a government’s position, still doubting its intentions and may not embrace it fully.

Instead of waiting for something (protests) to happen (opposition it likely to manufacture some form of protests and amplify it) and then go out explaining government’s stand, I think it would be better for the BJP to create its own Abhiyaan and I am suggesting a name – “Maati Se Moti” ( माटी से मोती). The narrative could be to establish connects with the farmer and discuss how to make most out of the farming land, how we can make better India through agriculture produce, what all government is doing for farmers etc. This way the discussion is more positive, it is about their welfare and BJP / Govt is not defending its position.

I have watched the documentary ( on BBC 4) and I have also watched the interview of Leslee Udwin on NDTV. After watching both, I believe that what Govt of India did was a right thing. The worse thing in this saga is the controversy created by media. Look at the headlines in the two leading news agencies in India – Times of India and NDTV. Same news, same day, how these channels are spinning the headlines. After watching and reading these news I felt really disgusted about the way these channels were sensationalising whole issue.

Whether you watch the documentary or not, either ways, you would come to the same conclusion that it was not done in right spirit and intentions were not to ‘study of rape incidence’ but to create publicity gathering documentary with the aim of making money.

Lets take first scenarios where you have not watched the documentary, but have seen Leslee’s interview. You would realise that she has ‘managed’ to get the clearance through questionable means.

Example 1) The jail authorities had cleared the documentary for non commercial purpose. She managed to convince them that every documentary has a small commercial value (this is her own admission) hence they should add the word for the purpose of clarity. It is very clear from the way publicity is generated that she ‘managed’ to get this word in the revised letter hiding the real intention of generating huge profits (through big publicity). To get these ‘permissions’ she was working through local ‘agents’ to ‘deal’ with jail authorities,

Example 2) She was supposed to show entire footage to the jail authorities. She very cleverly showed the non essential part – the shooting of the surroundings etc of few hours (!) to the committee on first day, they got (predictably) bored and decided to see the real part – the interviews with the rapists – next day. That never happened. She avoided showing the interview by hiding behind the technicalities, because her real intentions were not clean.

Jail authorities have sent the letter that she had violated the permission given and she should not release the documentary. Her stand and approach (from the interview) has been very confrontationist. She is seen daring the Indian government to stop its screening by telling that there would be protests in the world. Her attitude smacks of arrogance coming out of ‘I am superior’ kind of traits.

She proclaims that the documentary was supposed to be her gift to India. My question is why she never thought of making a documentary on the similar subject closer her home town – Birmingham, UK. There are more heinous crimes against young girls being committed for last 15 years and the society is silent. Should she not be gifting a documentary to her hometown? Read the rot in the British society and the extent of problems they have “Call for national debate on Muslim sex grooming”

Now lets consider you have seen the documentary and her interview too.

If this documentary was supposed to be study of society and problems of rape in Indian society, I did not come out with any new information or new angle than what has been extensively reported in the media, except for the interview of the rapist. Was there a need to re-state those incidences?

Was this documentary made to create sensation by giving platform to the rapist? The documentary ends up giving an impression that every rapist would start making the bucks ( media has reported that the rapist’s family was paid Rs.40,000/ – after intense negotiations) through such documentaries.

Why was the rapist shown in normal cloths than the jail cloths. As per the jail rule no inmate is allowed to use cloths other than those provided by the jail. Again, here, has she seemed to have ‘managed’ to work around the system through her local ‘agents’

Whether we agree or not, as per the Indian judicial norms the victim’s name is not supposed to be reported in rape cases. Why has she taken liberty with Indian law by stating the name so many times?

No wonder, if the jail authorities had seen the footage, they would have objected to it and it seems she wanted to hide these things from them.

Under these circumstances government has to take a stand to make sure that Indian laws and processes be followed and no one should be allowed to play with it. If there were shortcomings or system was compromised in the earlier time, it needs to be corrected.

Having said that, it is true that we have to get our act together, faster. We should have expedited the clearing of such case faster, we should have done much more with the ‘Nirbhaya fund’. I do not recommend only the laws to create safety of women – because in this statement it is assumed that women are weak and they need protection – I am of firm opinion that women have immense power – we as a society need to learn to respect them and accept their equal contribution in building society.

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“ IT industry is very strange, it doesn’t care what you did or what you were in the past, you are as good as yesterday”.

It is so true. Our industry is so fast moving that we can not continue the journey on our past laurels, we have to constantly keep doing better and better if we want to succeed. This is applicable in every field – coding, product designing, sales, marketing or back office work. Gone are the days when one would continue to be hero based on one master stroke delivered once upon a time. We have to push ourselves, we have to re-invent ourselves to move forward successfully. And this means we have to learn new things by keeping our minds open, by making conscious efforts.

I am totally connected and in sync with this thought.

And this is so true in our personal life as well, isn’t it? We need to constantly learn, absorb and grow if we want to be a better person. We can not afford to be a good person just once, we have to be better every time. And how can we do it without constantly improving when world, people, relationships around us are constantly evolving.

I feel life is a journey and only if we continue to learn do we get permission to go to next destination and enjoy the places, the moment we stop learning, life passes by without taking us.

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Have you ever paused and read / listen the thoughts that pop up in your subconscious mind? Most of the time we are not even aware that something is happening in our mind that is much deeper than we think. But if we train ourselves, we can listen to the thoughts that pop up in our deeper mind. In a simplistic way it needs us to look at ourselves like a third person and almost act like eavesdropping on our our own mind.

Once we get used to listening to it, it is fun. At times it is scary, at times it is entertaining. But it requires real courage to assimilate those thoughts, analyse and channelise our mind, for thoughts leads to action. Many times it happens that we don’t let some thoughts come to the surface because we don’t want them to influence our actions. But it is important that we acknowledge these deep thoughts and do something about it – either take some action or work towards totally removing these thoughts.

Many times these thoughts are motivating but we are afraid of their influence on our life. We don’t want to break the status quo, we don’t want to come out of our mould.

Some times these thoughts are depressing, at times they are totally unacceptable. And we simply brush them aside. Actually they don’t go away, they remain somewhere or even if they go away what is the guarantee they won’t come back? If we really want them to go away and never to come closer to our mind we need to acknowledge them and then understand why did they come in first place. If we can identify the root cause and act upon it, we would never have to spend our energies in pushing away negativities.

There is another very interesting game we can play with our mind i.e. to train our mind to generate positive thoughts naturally, without having to work for it. As we learn to listen to our thoughts, understand how they occur, it is not difficult to create our own system of making our mind a factory of positive / stimulating thoughts.

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In April 2011, I gave this presentation in my son’s school in Singapore for the children of 13 to 15 years old.

When I look back at it, I feel now this presentation or message should be given to 10 to 13 years old children.

In this presentation I spent good amount of time in giving context and making children ready to accept the message about how to use social media. What I have seen is that teenager children don’t accept things just because some one is telling them to do it. They want to know why, they are ready to question everything. But at the same time if we take them into confidence and share our thought process they appreciate it ( may not necessarily agree with it, but at least their readiness to listen is much higher).

There are three steps in this presentation before the actual message :

1. Quiz : This is just to make the learning fun. Make them relax and enjoy

2. “There can be different views about same thing” ( basically telling them that don’t have to look at any message as ‘one is right and other is wrong’). Hence I have given two examples – count the number of squares. You always get so many different answers. And you achieve your objective of conveying that there are different views about the same thing hence they should listen to parents / elders instead of taking ‘I am right/ you are wrong’ stand.

The second is a picture of old woman / young woman, it is to reinforce the above message.

3. In the third step I have tried to give them the context as to why they are being told or cautioned repeatedly about the use of social media. Whey parents / teachers are constantly reminding them to be careful. Most children tend to discard the message when told many times, they simple ignore you, hence I wanted to share with them concerns of parents and teachers.

For this purpose, I wanted to impress upon them that social media is a very new concept – less than 20 years old and compare that with all other means of communication which have been there for hundreds of year. There are well established norms of the society over these years. But with social media no one knows what are the norms, what is correct or what is acceptable. So obviously everyone in the society is anxious, at times apprehensive about this new form of the social life. So I wanted them to understand this perspective – when parents / teachers are telling you something there is a reason behind it, they are not there to stop you from doing something just for the sake of it.

By this time, I did find that children were ready to listen what I had to say.

At this stage, I did not take “Dos and Don’t” approach.

I wanted to share with them the impact of social media on our lives and how it is shaping our personal, professional and social life. I believe if we tell them more about the possible results, teenage children are able to take appropriate action to large extent.

My key message was to use 3T approach to decide if you are doing right thing or not. You would read about 3T in the slides.

Then I wrapped up the presentation with some good examples of social media where it is useful. Most often children are told about bad things that are happening because of the social media, I wanted to make sure that children understand that it can be used for betterment as well.

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You were the world champion in a particular sport for over 6 years, you lost that title to someone almost half of your age, your performance declines further and people have started writing you off. There are comments with a near cetainity that you were finished and your days were over. Next year you enter into the tournament, winner of the which would be challenging the world champion. Before the event you are not even amongst top 3 favourites. And you emerge as a winner with a thumping victory.

Stop imagining.

This is the real story of Vishwanathan Anand who just won the candidates tournament, undefeated, earning the right to challenge the current world champion – who defeated him in 2013, in November 2014.

On his return to Chennai on April 2, in an interview on NDTV among other thing, Vishwanathan Anand talked about “what it felt like playing with his young son, Akhil” The response to that question had a great insight and a message. I have enclosed the audio clip of that response here. For me it had three insights :

1. Change of context : When you can not control what has happened or what is happening, you need to find a way out by changing the context or getting into another situation – mentally or physically. This is what he said he did when it was a tough time to accept that he was no longer a world champion. He spent time playing with his son. Which basically relaxed him, helped him forget what had happened and most importantly helped him prepare for the next phase.

2. Playing with your son (or kids) : This is another important aspect. Spending time with your son is so much relaxing, it is such a stress buster. It gives so much happiness that it makes us mentally strong to face the world.

3. When I was listening to the interview, I thought his son might be 8 or 9 years old, old enough to play chess with world champion dad. But when I googled, I found that he is just 3 years old. And if a world champion dad feels good about playing a 3 years old boy, he must be really really good, another world champion in the making? Lets wait and watch.

For many reasons it was an important announcement. In its 7 years of journey, it has seen huge challenges – technical challenges as well business model challenges. So called pundits have questioned very existence of Twitter on commercial scale. It was dwarfed by the two towering giants – Google and Facebook. Even today it is not very big in terms of revenue it generates – between $500 million to $600 million by some estimates.

Given that Twitter had started off as a side project in early 2006, it could have died easily, specially when it did not have predictable revenue model till very recent times. I remember reading many articles when people wondered whether Twitter would remain relevant to the consumers. There were lot of uncertainties when third party apps like TweetDeck, Tweetie etc had threatened to gain more consumer traction than Twitter itself. After all company revenue ( specially Ad revenue) entirely depends on the extent of consumer interaction you have and insights you gain.

Despite these challenges Twitter has survived, flourished and is reaching an important milestone on the journey of successful companies – through this IPO it is being valued at around $12Billion company. Today it is one of the most important platforms for the politicians, the civic societies, the celebrities and all the influencers to directly engage with their followers. You can not imagine some of the great events of the century – without Twitter being used as a tool – President Obama’s election and re-election, Arab spring movements etc.

My take on this success is that Twitter kept doing what was right for its users. It started off small, but improvised, improved and delivered what users wanted – great engagement platform, search and ability to influence. As an outsider I believe Twitter was able to achieve this because it did not succumb to the pressures of to go after commercial model first. It apparently pursued what was right for its users and did not clutter the platform with ads. I believe that if it had only focussed on doing the ad and ad revenue, it might have distorted the user experience and acceptance and might not have got this tremendous user engagement – which is a real reason for its success so far. I believe that Twitter, continued to deliver what users were looking for, it became relevant and sticky and eventually found a way to monetize it. And I think thats the way it should be.